Outdoor theater, north edge of Denver 1973 - 1974

Robert Adams made this photograph, an "Outdoor theater, north edge of Denver", at an unknown date, using I assume, a camera! It's a black and white image, so the tones are crucial. Look at the grays, how they flatten the space. The houses in the distance are just shapes, like the trash heap in the foreground. It's almost like Adams is making a drawing, using light and shadow instead of lines. The screen is like a big, blank canvas – a promise of stories, maybe, or maybe just an empty space in a landscape that's already full of contradictions. That big container on the right, it’s like a minimal sculpture plopped down in the middle of… well, what? A field? A construction site? It's hard to tell. And that’s the point. Adams is showing us the mess, the in-between places, the stuff we usually don’t bother to look at. It reminds me of some of the New Topographics photographers. They were all about finding the beauty in the banal, the poetry in the everyday. This piece embraces ambiguity. There are no definitive meanings, just multiple interpretations.